So we might need a WALL-E -- a Waste Allocation Load Lifter: Earth-Class -- sooner than you think.

The world’s leaders know renewable energy has a huge role to play in future-proofing our planet.

Reimagining energy

Photo by Tom Fisk from Pexels

Tom Fisk

But it’ll take more than swapping out a coal power station with a solar panel or a wind farm to get the system right; we need supporting technologies and marketplaces.

We need to reimagine how energy is distributed, managed, traded, used and governed.

The energy sector is now faced with the reality of transitioning from a centralized electricity grid with a small number of very large power plants, to a decentralized low-carbon electricity grid connected to billions of devices such as rooftop solar panels, batteries, thermostats, white goods, electric vehicles and smart meters.

And thankfully the world’s innovators are ensuring these are starting to take shape.

The largest privately owned utility in Japan, Kansai Electric Power (KEPCO), has developed Apollon, an AI forecasting technology that gets its name via an acronym of areal solar power forecasting system using satellite imagery estimation.

Apollon synchronizes known data of installed solar photovoltaic capacity with predicted solar radiation forecasts, using smart meter data and weather satellite imagery from Himawari-8. With this it predicts energy supply in the region of Kansai in Japan, which has around 5GW of installed capacity of solar PV in its system. The system is already saving millions each year

As energy systems become more and more distributed with mixed sources of generation, across solar, wind, geothermal etc technology like Apollon will be vital in accurately predicting energy supply.

Switching systems

Nigel Hargreaves, Chairman of Norwich Community Solar in the UK believes that transforming our energy system requires fresh thinking across technical, commercial and market dimensions. Hargreaves said that “as energy generation becomes more distributed and no longer solely in the hands of power grid operators we need new ways to monetize the actual and non-generation related services a power grid provides.” He says. And it’s starting to happen.

For example, an industry scale wind farm, a community-owned battery and thousands of households with batteries may all contribute energy supply to a city and, through DERMS and other AI predictive technology, this supply can be balanced with demand in real time. Electric vehicles are essentially as batteries on wheels that can also sell energy in this way.

Blockchain technology can create a decentralized market for VPPs and peer-to-peer energy trading. Blockchain is able to handle transactions and payments on both sides of the meter, in real time, at a lower cost to all involved.

For example, you can make money by storing surplus rooftop solar energy in a battery at noon and selling it at 6pm that night. This helps manage supply in the energy system, flatten the spikes and drive down prices further, so really everyone wins.

Like anything new, there can be teething issues but also huge opportunities.

An energy system of the future needs to integrate a distributed mix of renewable energy sources, as well as ensure the security of supply and affordability.

So it’s going to have to look vastly different to the energy system and architecture we know today.

The big picture

Fremantle mayor Brad Pettitt, Power Ledger’s Jemma Green and Josh Byrne from Curtin University watch Ben Wyatt load a solar-powered mixer at a 100% renewable energy development in Western Australia.

Power Ledger

It’s encouraging to see these innovative technologies and projects get off the ground.

Even more exciting is considering how all these could interact in the future:

It’s going to be a 40 degree/100 Fahrenheit day tomorrow. The wholesale electricity market peak period is predicted at 6pm when everyone gets home from work and air conditioners get turned on. Forecasting technology predicts how much extra energy may be needed at that peak period and estimates how much has been stored in household PV batteries in the region that day. DERMS communicate across the devices in these houses, automatically turning off certain appliances during peak period to conserve energy and releasing stored energy in household batteries to the grid as required. Blockchain technology takes charge of the transaction of this energy from household to retailer. All of this happens in the background by these technologies and smart devices, without human-to-human interaction.

In this future energy system the wholesale grid will become a ‘smart grid’ comprised of smaller, interconnected microgrids at the personal, community, city or district scale.

Roles and hierarchy in this new power system are shifted. Traditional energy generators and retailers are still important but now, so too are homes and businesses -- everyday people that want to make a difference can do so by using and trading cleaner energy.

Dr. Jemma Green is Chair & Co-founder of Power Ledger and a researcher and speaker on the enterprise disruption caused by blockchain technology. Disclosure: I own Bitcoin and POWR.